Let us be about setting high standards for life, love, creativity, and wisdom. If our expectations in these areas are low, we are not likely to experience wellness. Setting high standards makes every day and every decade worth looking forward to.

Death affords those who are left an opportunity to reevaluate everything. And though we would give all we have to defer that opportunity, it exists anyway. It allows us to see the flimsiness of our expectations, to realize there is not expectation without disappointment; it allows us the possibility to being more sensitive, more vulnerable, to let others support us, and to notice the integrity and love often left unobserved in life's fast pace. Mainly, it gives us the chance to live life in the present.

Nothing sets a person up more than having something turn out just the way it's supposed to be, like falling into a Swiss snowdrift and seeing a big dog come up with a little cask of brandy round its neck.

The wise man, knowing how to enjoy achieved results without having constantly to replace them with others, finds in them an attachment to life in the hour of difficulty. But the man who has always pinned all his hopes on the future and lived with his eyes fixed upon it, has nothing in the past as a comfort against the present's afflictions, for the past was nothing to him but a series of hastily experienced stages. What blinded him to himself was his expectation always to find further on the happiness he had so far missed. Now he is stopped in his tracks; from now on nothing remains behind or ahead of him to fix his gaze upon.